I am not vegan.
If I were presented with a list of stats on my life, there are a lot of things that I would want to know. How many times have I narrowly avoided death? How many people have I affected positively with my words or actions? How many miles of hair have I grown? Not necessarily in that order.
One number that I think would shock me is the number of chicken thighs and legs I have eaten. Just this month, I have consumed about 48 chicken thighs, as well as a few legs. On a normal month, I think it would be reasonable to cut that number in half. If we assume that number has been reasonably consistent throughout my life (it has), that would put me in the neighborhood of 10,000 pieces of chicken in my life. This means that I have personally been responsible for consuming the lower half of about 5,000 birds, and it’s not even Thanksgiving yet.
I’m trying to imagine what 5,000 chickens would even look like. I imagine them all in a grassy field, happily going about their chicken business before one of them dies of natural causes. Then all the chicken friends get together to have a celebration of chicken life before their friend is taken away to an unknown location and delivered peacefully to my air fryer.
That’s what happens, right?
A moral ignorance.
When we look back to the generations that came before us, there are always practices and opinions that seem backwards through the lens of the present. Despite the way that things seem, humanity tends to trend toward inclusion. With some obvious and notable exceptions, we have become more civilized with expansions in trade and commerce. We have become more enlightened and scientific. We have an increased compassion and understanding of the people that are different from us. All of that said, there is much more work to be done. My question is… where?
When I think about my children’s future children, I know that there will invariably be some behavior or belief I hold that will seem abhorrent to them. The confusing part is that I have no idea what that may be. But I do have a feeling that they are coming for my meat.
A few months ago, I was removing the bones and skin from some of the aforementioned chicken thighs for dinner. My daughter was sitting at the kitchen counter helping me, as she loves to do. She was watching the process, and I could tell that something was happening in her mind.
“…Is that… blood? And… bones?”
I saw the connection happen in real time. She was realizing for the first time that her meat came from a living, breathing creature. And I wouldn’t have blamed her at all if she had decided in that moment to go a different direction. However, she is six, and chicken nuggets are delicious. But I will not be surprised in the least if she decides to become a vegetarian down the road. The only thing that keeps me from making that change myself is that I am able to mentally separate the chicken thigh from where it actually came. I am able to survive within that cognitive dissonance with little to no effort.
I know that there is a very loud majority that would ridicule this position, but If my choices were to either butcher a chicken myself or just eat a salad, I would take the salad every time. And I would share it with the chicken. Knowing all of this, I will continue to ignore the thought of chicken slaughter — believing all the while that that image of carnage may well be imprinted firmly into my daughter’s mind. I can only hope to be forgiven.
The arc of morality is long, but it bends toward soy protein.
